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Welcome to the course

Welcome to PTE Success: The Skills You Need. Meet your lead educator for the course, Sarah Bissell.
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SARAH BISSELL: Hello, and welcome to the course. My name is Sarah Bissell, and I’m your lead educator. Over the next four weeks, we’re going to help you identify, understand and practice the core communicative skills and subskills required to be successful in different item types in the PTE test. The ability to communicate effectively by combining language skills in speaking, writing, listening and reading is crucial to success in an academic or professional English speaking environment. For this reason, PTE uses task-based questions that integrate a number of key language skills. Most real life tasks that you may encounter, involve using more than one language skill together.
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For example, you may be asked to demonstrate your understanding of a reading passage by writing a summary or demonstrate your listening skills by re-telling a lecture. We have structured the course based on first identifying the integrated skills and characteristics of individual PTE item types. We then drill into the specific skills through focused interactive video lessons and practice tasks. In the first week of the course, we will explore the combination of essential speaking and writing skills that are required for success in many PTE items. In week two, we’re going to build on what we’ve learned in week one, and start thinking about the specific skills that relate to boosting your speaking and your writing.
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The third week of the course, teaches you the essential combined language skills that are assessed in the reading and listening parts. And finally, in week four, we look at the specific individual skills you need in reading and listening. We’re so glad you’ve joined us and we look forward to hearing from you in the conversations.

Welcome to PTE Success: The Skills You Need. Meet your lead educator for the course, Sarah Bissell. In this video Sarah gives you an overview of the journey that you will take in this course.

PTE task types

Pearson Test of English (PTE) uses task-based questions that integrate a variety of skills to represent the kinds of functions and situations students encounter during academic study or while working in an English-speaking environment.

This PTE task types table shows you what you will see in the test. PTE has 20 task types, each of which assesses one language skill or a combination of skills.

In addition to testing the core communicative skills of Speaking, Writing, Listening and Reading, the different task types in PTE also test a number of subskills (specific language skills eg identifying the topic). It is these subskills that you will learn about and practise over the following weeks.

Note about standard spelling: PTE test items use American standard spelling. In this course, test examples use American spelling conventions, but the course content uses Australian spelling. The PTE test recognises and accepts American, British, Australian and Canadian spelling, but you need to be consistent within the question you are answering.

The following website lists the most common American and Australian spelling differences.

Meet the Team

Sarah Bissell Sarah Bissell Hi, I am Sarah, the lead educator for this course and I’m delighted to be joining you each week as we learn about the skills for PTE success. I have 20 years’ experience in English language teaching, testing, teacher training and academic management. I also have a background in secondary school education and learning support. My professional interests are online learning and 21st century skills in language learning.

Here’s Sarah’s personal introduction in audio. View Sarah’s profile.

John Smith John Smith Hi, I am John. I am the Assistant Director of Studies for University Programs at Griffith English Language Institute, Griffith University. I have been in English language teaching for over 20 years as a teacher, trainer, developer, manager and lecturer. I am also interested in digital design for learning and data analytics.

Here’s John’s personal introduction in audio. View John’s profile.

Your task

Throughout the course we will refer to each of the item types in the test as we develop the skills that will help you to tackle them. Learn about the test format and watch the video for an overview of the different item types .

You can use this hashtag #FLPTEsuccess to talk about the course on Twitter.

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PTE Success: The Skills You Need

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